Blogs

Academics have a weakness for the latest cutting-edge innovations. It’s kind of what we do. And in many cases, that’s a good thing. This week, though, I’ve seen two older ideas come back as new solutions to current issues. They’ve both been out of fashion long enough that they actually seem new, even though they’re anything but.

I was in a late afternoon meeting last Friday with a group of the kind of folks who are likely to be in a late afternoon meeting on a Friday. I think we had a dean and three department chairs there as well as at least two program coordinators—folks, in other words, who do a good bit of service, or who have put in so much time doing service in the past that they are now doing it full-time as administrators. Everyone was breathing that kind of sigh...

Those of us who have been, or are, in graduate school have come across this mantra: publish or perish. What is important about this phrase is not only the unrelenting pressure it puts on graduate students and early career faculty to publish, but the unspoken lack of emphasis it places on teaching

Reading Reamde (Kindle) and Ready Player One (Audible) simultaneously is somewhat of a surreal experience, as both novels feature massively...

‘Flexibility’ is genuinely slippery concept, one that provides some sense of coherence with vagueness. It is also a concept that is a resource to be used in the pursuit of power. I’m most familiar with the concept of flexibility in relationship to the changing nature of production systems. There has been a long debate in Economic Geography, for example, about phenomena like ‘flexible specialization’ and ‘flexible accumulation’. These interrelated concepts have helped scholars and industry analysts make sense of how production systems are evolving to cope with increasingly levels of competitive pressure, the emergence of global value chains, new forms of territorial development, and so on.

A thoughtful correspondent wrote last week to express concern about what she perceived as a growing rift between faculty and...

Every year or two, I need to restore what passes for my sanity. When that need arises, I read. More...

Michael Feldstein has a terrific post over on his e-Literate blog: "Why Pearson’s OpenClass Is a Big Deal." Michael's post...